By ADAM GIFFORD
The spate of reviews into how state sector organisations manage large IT projects hasn't come a moment too soon. But do they go far enough?
The primary production select committee has reviewed the Land Information New Zealand (Linz) Landonline project to digitise the title and survey plan registries. The job is late and over budget.
The committee recommended Linz be allowed to continue, after receiving assurances it would keep within the $145 million to $155 million cost forecast, but delivery of proposed outcomes will be monitored.
Linz admitted ongoing risk in "managing client expectations of what phase one will deliver."
That means phase one, five years in the making, won't deliver much, just as the police Incis computer system delivered little in phase one.
Phase two is billed as allowing surveyors and conveyancers to electronically lodge survey plans and the majority of title dealings, but that will also be constrained by some of the underlying technology choices.
For technology and licensing reasons, surveyors or the public won't be able to get online access to the maps and spatial data being put into the system so expensively.
To use the system, they must pay licence fees upfront and then be charged for each bit of data. The economic model is one of user-pays, full-cost recovery, at a time when the internet is challenging all such economic models.
The system seems old and clunky before it's even built.
Andersen Consulting has been chosen as the preferred supplier to do a belated user requirement study for stage two. Five years down the track and Linz is still unsure about what users want. Hello?
There are alternatives. A New Zealand-designed product which allows web access to stored documents and plans is even now being installed in the English land registry, at a far lower cost and far faster than the Landonline system.
The select committee was not able to relitigate those technology choices in the 90 minutes its financial review of Linz took. Despite the committee's being concerned about "obvious shortcomings in the design and scoping" of Landonline, the project is safe. The software vendors and integrators will continue being paid their millions. And if the outcome falls short of expectations, well, that will have to be managed.
Like many Government agencies, Linz no longer has the internal resources to design and build technology projects, so it relies on outside consultants.
But the alarm bells should have gone off at the decision to build interfaces between a range of incompatible technologies.
Before this elephant gets any whiter, the committee might want to spend another 90 minutes considering whether another Incis might be in the making.
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